W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - History

This page contains all the dated news items over the history of SVG.
Links on the this page are historical, and might age over time.

2004-06-21

SVG Mobile in Japanese

広瀬行夫 (Yukio Hirose) has published a translation of the SVG Mobile specification in Japanese: Mobile SVG プロファイル：SVG Tiny と SVG Basic. To facilitate comparison with the normative English text, the Japanese and English versions of each paragraph or section are displayed together.

DocSoft announced a public beta of their CGM v4 to SVG converter. The main focus is WebCGM to SVG 1.1 conversion. The software runs in a .NET environment.

2004-05-14

BeatWare Mobile Designer is released

Beatware Mobile Designer, an SVG authoring tool specifically aimed at animated, mobile SVG Tiny content creation, is released. It allows editing of other SVG ptofiles, but has automated checking to ensure that only valid SVG Tiny content is exported.
A trial download is available.

2004-05-14

BikeCAD Pro exports SVG

BikeCAD Pro, a Java-based CAD program specific to bicycle frame design, now exports SVG. It integrates the Batik toolkit to enable SVG generation.

2004-04-19

Sony Ericsson K700 supports SVG using ZOOMON

The newly released K700 mobile phone from Sony Ericsson supports SVG thanks to the ZOOMON SVG Player. The K700 will be available world wide and is a consumer level handset. Read more
in the ZOOMON Press Release.

2004-04-06

PdfTron Systems adds Linux support to PDF2SVG

PDF2SVG 1.6 is now available on Linux as well as Windows. It converts PDF to SVG; both GUI and command line converters are available.

2004-03-01

SVG seen as key to Mozilla

Brendan Eich, Chief Architect for Mozilla and inventor of JavaScript, listed "Accelerate and optimize the SVG effort" as a key requirement in his Mozilla Futures dev-day slides. He also mentioned hardware accelleration on Quartz, OpenGL, and GDI+.

Sketsa is a vector based drawing application which uses SVG as the native file format and has visual, DOM, and source views. Version 1.7 improves the property editor and toolbox. Sketsa runs on any Java 1.4.1 or higher platform.

Lauris Kaplinski announced that Sodipodi 0.34, a native SVG editor for Linux and Windows, now features path composition
operations (union, intersection and subtraction) and
calligraphic pen based freehand drawing.

Andrew Girow has released version 1.6 of TinyLine, a Mobile SVG Applications and Development Tools for J2ME devices. TinyLine 1.6 includes a new high-class rendering and an improved support of animations and events.

2004-01-27

New licensing for eSVG

Damir Jezic has announced new pricing and licensing
deals for eSVG, the
embedded SVG project. Noncommercial licenses are available and
users that purchase the standard package get unlimited numbers
of runtime licenses for mobile devices.
See their pricing page for more details.

2004-01-08

ZOOMON achieve Symbian Certification

Fresh from signing distribution deals with two major
manufacturers, ZOOMON have achieved full Symbian certificiation for its SVG Player product.
Read more in the Press Release.

2003-12-09

Sharp and BitFlash release SVG Mobile handsets

Sharp Electronics and BitFlash have teamed to release the V601SH, an
SVG Tiny handset in Japan. They also provide a document
conversion tool, allowing Word, PDF and Powerpoint documents
to be transcoded to SVG for display on the phone.
More information in the Sharp and BitFlash press releases.

The librsvg team have anounced a new release of the librsvg
SVG rendering library. This release fixes a lot of rendering bugs in
order to enable near perfect rendering of the Sodipodi flag collection
and the gnome-themes-extras SVG metathemes. People using SVG through the
libRSVG library, for instance with GNOME, are highly recommended to
upgrade to this release.

2003-12-06

GNOME SVG themes

The GNOME-themes-extras package contains themes using SVG graphics to
theme your applications, file system icons and menu's in GNOME. It is
worth nothing that these themes actually use SVG files unlike some other
themes which only use converted bitmaps of vector images.

2003-11-13

SVG 1.2 Draft Released

The SVG Working Group released a new draft of
SVG 1.2 today. New features include vector effects and
a description of separate image and application flavors of SVG.

2003-10-31

GEMoDe: an SVG Graphics Engine for Mobile Devices

The German research institute Fraunhofer IDG Rostock have
announced GEMoDe, a Java-based graphics engine that supports
SVG. It supports interactivity, and therefore can be used as
a platform for developing applications. There are some
screenshots and a demonstration applet.
The viewer is designed to be easily adapted to resource limited
devices such as mobile or smart phones.

2003-10-28

AOL purchases Viewpoint source for rendering images, including SVG

AOL has purchased US$9M of source and US$ 1M of services from Viewpoint Corporation. This gives them the ability to display and intermix video, audio, 3-D and 2-D images in various formats including SVG. Since SVG 1.2 adds audio and video support, AOL would be well placed to implement SVG 1.2 should they see customer demand.

2003-10-27

Geosoft announces US$3M deal for SVG Mobiile GIS content

Geosoft announced a 3 million US dollar deal with MTI to supply SVG based mapping data for deployment on cellular phones, PDAs and vehicle mapping systems.

2003-10-20

Oracle and Corel integrate SVG tools with Oracle Database 10g

Oracle and Corel announced
integration of the XML functionality in Oracle® Database 10g with
Corel's XML and SVG tools, Corel® XMetaL® and Corel® Smart Graphics Studio.

2003-10-17

Beatware announce Mobile SVG authoring with e-Picture Pro 4.0

Beatware announced
e-Picture Pro 4.0 with
authoring support for SVG Tiny, SVG Basic, and SVG Full. The product
is bundled with the BitFlash SVG Tiny viewer
so that content can be previewed on the desktop before deployment to mobile clients.
e-Picture Pro 4.0 runs on Windows platforms and a
trial version
is availabe for download.

2003-10-05

Scribus 1.1.1 has SVG import

Scribus 1.1.0,
a desktop publishing program whose native format is in XML, now
features SVG import and rendering in addition t SVG export.
Scribus runs on the Linux, HP-UX, Solaris,
and BSD platforms, using Qt3. It uses Freetype as a font rendering engine.

2003-09-30

SVG Mobile Competition: Entries Due 3 November 2003

Design an SVG Tiny greeting card in 30k or less, and win a
Nokia 3650 tri-band GSM handset. The best entries will be
featured on the W3C Web site, linked to their designers' Web
pages, with an interview with the winning designer. Enter as
many times as you like through 3 November. The SVG Working
Group will choose the winner who will be announced on 24
November.
Announced at SVG Open, the SVG Mobile Competition is the
first in a series of SVG competitions.

2003-09-23

TinyLine SVG Toolkit 1.5 released

Andrew Girow released version 1.5 of the TinyLine Mobile SVG
toolkit today. It can be used for a wide range of graphic
centric applications and services, including multimedia
messaging, personalization, entertainment, maps, and so
on. It has a wide range of features, described in detail on
the TinyLine home
page.

2003-09-15

KSVG to be included in KDE 3.2

As mentioned on the KSVG Home
Page: KSVG, the KDE implementation of SVG, will be
definately included into KDE 3.2 and that will also be the
first, official release of KSVG. The developers still need
help, but have put together a preview of expected features.

Today, Corel unveiled an update to Grafigo, their Tablet-PC application for content creation and annotation. It uses SVG as its native format. New features include an SVG slideshow and real-time collaboration.
More details in the
press release.

2003-09-03

Corel SVG Viewer 2.1

Corel have released
version 2.1 of their SVG viewer. New features include
CAD-like visualization for rendering accuracy, improved scripting
and improved performance.

2003-08-15

Adobe SVG Viewer 6.0 Technology Preview

Adobe SVG
Viewer Version 6.0 (Technology Preview) was released
over a month ago. It implements many of the features
in the latest SVG 1.2 draft, including Audio and Video,
Rendering Custom Content (RCC) and cursors as well as
a number of bugfixes.

2003-08-14

New Learn SVG Book available

SVG-Developers regulars Michel Hirtzler, Stefan Goessner
and Jon Frost have released their new SVG book:
Learn SVG.
It's in a workbook-like format with plenty
of examples.

2003-08-13

XStudio 2.0 Trial released

EvolGrafiX have announced a trial of
XStudio 2.0 is now available. XStudio is a very powerful SVG
authoring tool that supports the creation of
animated and scripted SVG content.

The SVG Working Group have released the third
Working Draft of SVG 1.2. New and enhanced
features include a component architecture (RCC), wrapping
text, filter extensions and a RelaxNG schema.

2003-07-15

First SVG Print draft releases

The SVG Working Group have released the first
Working Draft of SVG Print, a set of authoring
guidelines for SVG documents that allow final form
platform independent rendering to hard-copy and online
output devices.

2003-05-01

Corel release Smart Graphics Studio

Corel have released
Smart Graphics Studio, a development environment
for graphical applications delivered with SVG.
Corel also released a new version of their SVG viewer today with many new features.

2003-04-29

Second Working Draft of SVG 1.2 Released

The SVG Working Group have released a
new draft of SVG 1.2.
There are a huge number of changes since the first draft,
particularly in the areas of rendering XML, flowing text and
audio and video.

2003-04-28

Texterity launch FreeSVG

Texterity have launched
FreeSVG, a service of Texterity to encourage
the use of SVG on the web and demonstrate a useful set of the
functionality available with TextCafe. The output file includes SVG
pages created with TextCafe's PDF to SVG conversion technology, along with
javascript representations of the XML Table of Contents and searchable word
lists. An HTML framework is also provided.

2003-04-28

ZOOMON and Opera deliver SVG on Symbian

SVG viewer manufacturers ZOOMON and browser developers Opera Software have
partnered to deliver SVG viewing capability on the Opera Browser running
on Symbian devices. Read more in the press release.

Bruce Robertson, of the Dept. of Classics,
Mount Allison University, NB, Canada has written a tutorial on embedding SVG fonts using Cocoon. It uses Xalan/XSLT and Batik to read an SVG file. and adds the necessary SVG fonts.

The latest version of
eSVG, an embedded SVG viewer and application
environment, has been released. It boasts faster SMIL animation,
history management, links, vertical text, more SVG DOM support
and transparency in images. Registered users can
download the new version.
A full feature list and
pricing details are available.

2003-02-18

SVG Printing Requirements Published

The SVG Working Group have released the first version
of the SVG Printing
Requirements. The goal is to develop a set of authoring
guidelines and new features that enable SVG to be used in a
variety of printing situations. Also note the new
public-svg-print@w3.org mailing list for discussion on this
topic.

2003-01-31

SVG Open 2003 Calling for Participation

SVG Open 2003 will be
held 13-18 July 2003 in Vancouver Canada. The call for
participation closes on 28 February. The conference aims
to cover a broad range of topics around SVG, so if you have an
idea for a presentation or a product to promote, we'd love to
see you there. Also, there are some prizes for the best abstracts
and presentations.

2003-01-29

EvolGrafix release XStudio

EvolGrafix has
released
XStudioNext, an SVG Authoring Environment. It uses SVG as its native
format and allows you to edit the SVG in a graphical or
code-based view. See the web site for more details on the large range of features.

2003-01-22

Draft Roadmap for SVG announced

The SVG Working Group has released the first public
version of the SVG Roadmap.
It's a draft which is missing details on some of the
expected new work, but should give an indication of
the general direction. Also, the Working Group has
made a public version of
their charter available for informative and
historical purposes.

Adobe Systems have released
Graphics Server 2 (formerly Altercast) and
Document Server, products that use a wide range of W3C specifications,
including SVG, XSL and RDF. Graphics server can take rich SVG files,
manipulated in XML or with the built-in charting tools, and produce
PDF output. Document server extends the concept to more formats,
allowing XSLFO to PDF conversion.

2003-01-09

Using SVG from Java

SVG Working Group member Christophe Jolif has
written an article Bringing SVG Power to Java Applications
on Sun's Java Development Site. It demonstrates how to build
SVG libraries and applications on top of the Java platform.

2003-01-08

TextCafe 3.0 Supports SVG

Texterity have announced
support for SVG in the TextCafe publishing system. It converts
PDF into SVG pages and provides customers with a representation
of pages that are identical to the printed page. See their
demonstration site
for examples. Features include SVG font embedding and extraction
of raster images into SVG image elements.

2003-01-06

JackSVG 1.1 - skinable slide generator

Yet another SVG presentation program has been
released by DSTC.
However, JackSVG
uses themes/skins to change slide appearance, performs layout
and line breaking using font metrics, and supports keyboard
navigation.

2002-12-13

Microsoft Office 11 with SVG support

At XML 2002 in Baltimore, Microsoft announced and
demonstrated Office 11. Microsoft Visio for Office 11
(nearing the end of the first beta cycle) can both export
and import SVG. Links to follow when available.

2002-12-13

Corel Smart Graphics Studio Unveiled

Corel have announced
Smart Graphics Studio, a development platform
designed to speed and simplify the creation of SVG-based smart
graphics. It will transform XML and legacy data into dynamic and
interactive SVG content, allowing publishing to any device.
Smart Graphics Studio includes a development environment, a server
and an SVG viewer. Read more, including testimonials from
Ford, in the press release.
Also, Corel announced a new version of XMetaL, a platform
for XML editing.

Savage Software have
released version 1.23 of their CAD2SVG product, which converts CAD files
into SVG. A demo version is available. Read more about the products
from Savage in their newsletter.

2002-11-15

SVG 1.1 and SVG Mobile Profiles become W3C Proposed Recommendations

The W3C is pleased to announce the Proposed Recommendation of both
SVG 1.1
and
SVG Mobile Profiles. The SVG Working Group believes these specifications are
ready to become W3C Recommendations and have called for a vote
of the W3C Membership.
There is an
implementation report, showing the results of 15 implementations
against the SVG
Test Suite, including many implementations on mobile devices.
The Working Group wishes to thank the public for the large part they played in creating
this open specification. Enjoy!.

2002-11-15

First Working Draft of SVG 1.2 Released

The W3C released the
first working draft of SVG 1.2 today. It's not a complete
specification, but rather intended to give the public the
opportunity to give feedback on the work under consideration
for the next version of the SVG language. Get in early and
make a difference to the Web! We expect to hear from you.

2002-11-08

Corel announce SVG viewer preview

Following on from
Grafigo, Corel have released an
SVG Viewer
for public
preview. This edition runs on Windows 98, 2000, NT4, XP and XP for Tablet PC
and has an impressive range of features including support
for all SVG shapes, cursors, unlimited zoom, access
to SVG source, CSS and a built-in script engine.
Read the
technical specifications for more information.

2002-11-08

Corel Grafigo brings SVG to Windows Tablet PC

Corel have released
Grafigo, a tool for sketching, annotating and creating
graphics on Windows XP Tablet PC. It is available now for
free download and, most importantly, uses SVG as its
native format.

Safe Software Inc.,
has added SVG export capability to its flagship data translation and
transformation product FME (Feature Manipulation Engine). This enables
SVG to be created directly from over 100 FME-supported formats
and systems, including Oracle Spatial, ERSI Shape/Geodatabase/ArcSDE,
Intergraph/Bentley DGN, MapInfo TAB/MIF/MID and AutoCAD DWG/DXF.
More details in the
press
release.

2002-11-01

Toon Boom Studio SVG capable

One of the leading cartoon authoring tools,
Toon Boom Studio
has added SVG support thanks to a partnership with
Plazmic Media Engine.
It is now possible to use Toon Boom Studio to
author content for handheld devices, such as iMode in
Japan, using SVG.
Read the Press Release (PDF).

2002-10-31

Square One generate SVG from PS, EPS, PDF and WMF

Square One has released
PDF2vector on Sun Solaris and HP-UX platforms,
enabling automated and server-side transformation of PDF (1.3) files to
SVG for the Web. This new module, along with the WMF2vector
module to generate SVG from Windows Metafiles, complements Square One's
existing PS2vector product (also available on Windows)
that converts PostScript and EPS to SVG.

2002-10-30

SVG Unleashed has leash removed

SVG Unleashed, a new book from Sams, has hit
the bookshelves. It features an impressive list of
authors, including Andrew Watt, Niklas Gustavsson,
Kevin Lindsey and the chair of the SVG Working Group at W3C, Chris
Lilley. It weighs in at more than 1100 pages, as has
more than 8 megabytes of
related example files available
as a free download.

2002-10-29

Showcaster produce SVG presentations

Showcaster publish conference
materials, such as the slides and audio of presentations, on the Web.
They can export their presentations in SVG - see their
Welcome Presentation (requires Adobe SVG Viewer version 3 or greater, or an SVG viewer
that handles embedded mp3 audio).

Version 0.27 of Sodipodi, a
native SVG authoring environment for Linux,
has been released. Besides general bugfixes, improvements include support of arbitrary
Unicode values in text strings, and support for radial gradients. It has supported vertical text since version 0.25. Sodipodi
may be downloaded
in rpm or source format, and there is a page
of screenshots.

2002-10-02

Bitflash Vis player goes Beta

Don Liberty announced that Bitflash Vis, a
Mobile SVG player for PocketPC or Symbian, has finished alpha testing and a beta version is
available for download.

2002-09-26

Public Beta of PCX G2 SVG Authoring tool

Alexander Adam of PCX Software announced that
G2, a native
SVG authoring tool for Windows, is now in its first public beta and available
for download, testing,
and reporting of bugs. Beta 1 is aimed at testing of the
SVG import (viewing, moving, scaling etc) and simple editing of geometries and stylesheets. Synchronised
visual, source and DOM views are provided.

Vincent Hardy announced Batik 1.5 beta 4b, available
for download in
source or binary forms. Batik includes Squiggle, an SVG browser; plus utilities to generate SVG from Java,
convert Truetype fonts to SVG, and render SVG on the server.

La Bibliothèque nationale de France (the French national library) have launched a
gallery of their exhibitions as an SVG site. It has more than
36,000 lines of SVG source over many hundreds of files, showing
the true scalability of SVG. The site uses the benefits of XML,
generating the site from XML sources with embedded metadata.
Not only that, it looks fantastic!

2002-07-17

SVG Open a huge success

SVG Open, the
first ever SVG conference, was held this week in
Zurich and was an amazing success. There were over
200 attendess from all over the world (an informal check
was at least 10 countries), two parallel tracks
and lots of lively discussion. Check the web site
for pictures and presentation materials.

2002-06-26

Corel Draw 11 with Enhanced SVG

Corel Corporation have
announced the next version of the Corel Graphics Suite, Version
11 (shipping late July). The updated CorelDRAW features
include: "Enhanced! SVG support - create data-driven,
dynamic graphics using SVG".
While you are at Corel, read more about
Corel Deepwhite.

Sharp of Japan announced
SharpMotionART, an
implementation of Mobile SVG currently shipping on more than eight
mobile phones. There are also viewers available for Windows, Palm and
PocketPC, a large collection of demonstration animations
as well as a authoring tool which can create animated content for
the supported devices.

The first ever international conference on SVG, SVG Open is still
accepting registrations. It will be held July 15-17 in
Zurich, Switzerland. The program is
full of SVG experts, including a panel session with the
SVG Working Group (bring your rotten fruit :).

2002-06-12

Online service for extracting text from
SVG

The W3C has made an online service for extracting
the text from an SVG file available. The results can
be in text or HTML formats. The service only handles
uncompressed files at the moment, but shows how easy it is
for a search engine to handle SVG files.

2002-06-11

SVG rendered in Flash player

Helen Triolo has a demonstration of a limited subset of
SVG
rendered using Actionscript in the Flash
player. This is a great example of the strengths of SVG
- easy to parse, well defined rendering model,
etc. While the current Flash drawing API could not
handle all the functionality that SVG offers, it will be
interesting to see where this impressive work ends up.

2002-06-06

SVG Developers Archive Open

The SVG
Developers community forum had opened its archives to
the public. Shouldn't be long before search engines have
indexed this vast repository of SVG knowledge.

With four presentations and two tutorials, XML Europe
attendees were surrounded by SVG. In his xmlhack.com posting, Eric van der Vlist had this to say: 'If you think of SVG as a toy technology to draw nice pictures, wake up! SVG is invading your cell phone and this "graphical XML" might wipe out "text XML" (such as XHTML and XSL-FO), just as graphical user interfaces have wiped out text-based user interfaces. SVG has been one of the most-talked-about technologies during XML Europe 2002'.

2002-05-09

Three presentations on SVG at WWW2002

The popularity of SVG was demonstrated at the World Wide
Web conference with three presentations on SVG. Chris
Lilley described the future of SVG including SVG Mobile,
Kim Marriot of Monash University in Melbourne described
a constraint system for SVG diagrams and Dean Jackson
presented 30 minutes of SVG
demonstrations.

2002-04-30

SVG 1,1, SVG Mobile move to Candidate Recommendation

W3C has moved the SVG 1.1
and SVG Mobile
specifications to Candidate Recommendation status, and calls on the developer community
to intensively test, implement and use these specifications now they have reached this
level of maturity. A Press Release was issued (in
English,
French
and Japanese)
supported by Testimonials
from members of the Working Group.

2002-04-30

W3C releasesXHTML, MathML, SVG document type

W3C has released the first Working Draft of a document type that
integrates SVG, XHTML and
MathML draft, a collaborative work by the SVG, HTML and Math Working Groups,
is edited by 石川 雅康
(ISHIKAWA Masayasu) and uses the SVG 1.1 modularization. It
forms an excellent basis for scientific and engineering documents that include formatted
text, lists, tables, formulae and interactive diagrams; early implementations include
Mozilla and Amaya.

2002-04-30

Nokia releases authoring tool for 3G Mobile

Nokia has released an authoring tool for 3G Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).
It is a free download, and functions
as a plug-in to the SVG-enabled Adobe
Golive 6.0 system.

2002-04-26

SVG Composer 2 released

Wesley Perkins has released version 2 of SVG
Composer, which can edit SVG files specified by URL as well as local files.

2002-04-23

W3C releases Amaya version 6

W3C has released version 6 of the open source, multi-namespace aware Amaya browser/editor. This is an internationalized, Unicode enabled version. There are improvements and bug fixes in MathML, XHTML, CSS and SVG support. Annotations can now be made on SVG, MathML or XHTML content and can themselved be written in any of these languages. In addition, a first OpenGL version is available for testing. Binaries (Solaris, Linux, Windows NT/2000/XP or 9x/ME) and source are available.

2002-04-23

Uismedia announces MapViewSVG

Uismedia announces MapViewSVG, a new
tool to convert ArcView-Views into
interactive SVG Maps. An evaluation version can be downloaded.
More information about
MapViewSVG is available in ; information and an evaluation
version are also available in German

The April installment of Antoine Quint's Sacré SVG column is entitled "Hot and Fresh Technology for the Enterprise". He looks at corporate intranet usage of SVG for large-scale, enterprise-wide, XML-connected solutions and compares it to DHTML and Flash MX

Andrew Girow announces TinyLine,
a Personal Java(tm) (or J2ME Personal Profile if you
like) software development kit for applications that
want to use images in the Mobile Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes on Java
enabled devices.

2002-04-10

eSVG version 1.1 released

Version 1.1 of the eSVG implementation
of SVG for embedded systems has been released. In addition to the UniOP real-time operating system, it is available for PocketPC and for Windows. Further details are avalable from the embedding.net site and an evaluation version may be downloaded.

2002-04-08

Review: IMS Web Dwarf

.net magazine reviews
IMS Web Dwarf, a free SVG editor and notes that it's more like a graphics program than a (table based) HTML editor. In addition to the free Web Dwarf, Virtual Mechanics also produce the more fully featured commercial products Web Spinner and Web Engine.

Transform magazine has an article The
Next Wave for Graphics by Bill Trippe, who notes
But I've thought about this long and hard and decided
that you need to start thinking about Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG). SVG may tip the balance and help the Web
realize its potential as a ubiquitous interface to all
content and applications..

2002-03-22

PCX Software describe eMotion SVG tool

PCX Software describe their forthcoming eMotion
SVG authoring tool. There is also a forum for potential
users to help shape the capabilities of the program.

2002-03-17

SVG Export for ESRI and MapInfo

GeoGraphs Corporation announced SVG MapGen,
a standalone tool for converting ESRI Shape and MapInfo
MID/MIF documents to interactive SVG maps. An evaluation
version is available for download and the user
manual is online.

Vincent Hardy announced availability of the first beta of
Batik 1.5 The
major advance over the previous version 1.1.1 is that Batik now
supports modification of SVG graphics through scripting
which allows dynamic updates to SVG documents in response to
user events and even animations of graphical elements.
Specifically, Batik now provides extensive support for DOM Level 2 Core and Events .

An article, SVG: Modularized
and Mobile by NewMedia staff, develops an animated bar chart example in SVG and
concludes Wow! Once all browsers support SVG we can forget about stretching
one-pixel images into shape in HTML...

2002-03-06

WebRef article on SVG Mobile

Another article, also called
SVG: Modularized
and mobile by Michael ClaÃen, looks at what's new in SVG 1.1 and
the SVG Mobile profiles and concludes With SVG going the same route
as XHTML in terms of modularization and well-defined profiles, hopes
are high that the two combined will become the prominent format for
documents, both on the Web and off.

W3C released last call drafts of SVG
1.1 and SVG
Mobile. SVG 1.1 is a modularized form of SVG 1.0,
using W3C XML Schema rather than DTDs as the formalism;
the specification itself is also available in specprod
XML as well as XHTML. By dividing up the functionality
of SVG into modules, it facilitates the production of
profiles of SVG. Mobile SVG creates two such profiles:
SVG Tiny, which is mainly aimed at cellphones, and SVG
Basic for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Last
Call feedback closes 15 March 2002.

2002-01-23

New XML.com SVG column

A new column on XML.com, Sacré SVG by Antoine
Quint, kicks off with Digging
Animation. Using a step-by-step conversion of a
Macromedia Flash animation into SVG as a running
example, Antoine demonstrates the usage of declarative
SMIL Animation syntax in SVG.

2002-01-21

New release of XSmiles

Release 0.5 of
XSmiles, the multi-namespace browser including SVG,
SMIL and XForms support, was released. Release
notes list the improvements and additions to
integration, XForms, XML Events, and SMIL. There is also
GPS support..

XML.com has an article SVG: Where Are We Now? by Antoine Quint, surveying the state of the SVG software scene and giving advice on viewers, editors, svg-exporting graphics packages, and other tools. Antoine concludes I think the state of SVG's support in the
industry is astonishing since its still in its early stages. It is also interesting to take into account the
speed at which progress has been and is still being made. At this pace, this article will need a
complete overhaul in six months.

Batik 1.1rc4was released in source and binary form today. Changes include an improved rasterizer, better link handling, performance tuning and an extended regression test suite. Written in Java 2, it runs on any Java-2 platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS X, etc)

The winner of 2001 XML WWWページコンテスト 応募作品説明資料 (2001 WWW XML Page Contest) was Local Community Information Service (in Japanese) by Suppon Project. This design used a central database of map information in G-XML format, and conversion to SVG for client display. The prize was awarded at the recent XML 2001 Japan conference, and a detailed report on the contest and the reviews will be published in the next issue of XML Press magazine.

2001-Nov-07

Adobe announced the final release Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0 for Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP and MacOS 8.x/9.x/10.1. It is available in 15 languages. Compared to version 2.0 more elements, attributes, CSS properties and DOM methods from the SVG 1.0 specification are supported. There is also an internal script engine.

2001-Nov-05

Translations of the SVG 1.0 specification are now in progress into German and into Japanese. See the SVG translations page for details.

The SVG Factory is a way to export SVG via the Windows clipboard. it works best with applications that put vector data such as WMF or EMF onto the clipboard. There is documentation online. The source of the C++ libraries can also be licensed to provide SVG export capability for Windows programs.

Amaya 5.2 is released. SVG-specific changes include support for the embed element for external SVG images, and handling of nested link anchors.Binaries for various platforms are available, plus source. English and French spell-check dictionaries are included.

2001-Oct-26

The new version 0.45 of X-Smiles, the SVG/SMIL/XForms/XSL/etc multi namespace browser was released. New features include XML Event support, improved SMIL 2 basic support, XForms enhancements. and performance and bugfixes.

C|net has a multi-page article Real-world SVG by Jackson West which includes coverage of styling, scripting, and a 'beyond the basics' section.

2001-Sep-24

Adobe issued a press release about Illustrator 10. This will have SVG import, improved and faster SVG export, support for symbols, support for data driven graphics with templates, and editable SVG effects. Macworld had a review.

MacCentral reported that Adobe announced InDesign 2.0 which introduces built-in, extensible support for exporting
SVG as well as importing and exporting XML files.

JASC announced public availability of WebDraw preview release 5. This adds an animation timeline for editing timed animations, has an improved DOM viewer, a preview pane, and improved SVG support in terms of elements and attributes recognised. Generated SVG is now updated to the SVG 1.0 Recommendation.

Alex Fritze releases build 0.6 of Mozilla SVG. Binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are available, and you can also get the source out of CVS (now in a Mozilla branch) and compile it yourself on other platforms.

InternetNews.com runs W3C Recommendation Brings New Life to Graphics by Thor Olavsrud, and focusses on server-side generation of SVG using standard XML tools - to produce such things as customised banner graphics - and combining SMIL Animation with DOM manipulation.

2001-Aug-31

Michael Bierman announced version Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0beta1. New features include 'switch', (plus 'requiredFeatures' and 'systemLanguage), linking to SVG images, color profiles, markers, and views. DOM and CSS support is also improved. There are bug report and feedback forms. In addition to existing platforms, MacOS X and Windows XP are supported.

Version 0.4 of XSmiles was released. New features include support for SMIL 2.0 Basic and for the latest draft of XForms. As before, there is SVG and XSL-FO and XSL-T support as well.

2001-Aug-28

An XMLhack article by Edd Dumbill notes that FOP wraps Batik - the open-source FOP implementation of XSL Formatting Objects, which previously had its own SVG renderer, now includes the similarly open-source Batik SVG Toolkit. A much wider portion of the SVG specification can thus be used, mixed in with Formatting Objects, to generate high quality PDF documents from XML source.

2001-Aug-24

The German Linux User magazine has an article Vektorzeichenprogramme
Punkt, Gerade, Kurve by Frank Wieduwilt comparing six illustration programs - Xfig, Figurine, Impress, Sodipodi, Kontour and Sketch - the latter three of which can both import and export SVG. (in German).

The first draft of the SVG Mobile Requirements document was released. It lists the design principles and requirements for the creation of a mobile profile of the SVG specification to be developed by the W3C SVG2 working group.

The first draft of the SVG 1.1/2.0 Requirements document was also released. It lists the design principles and requirements
for future versions of the SVG language, in particular
versions 1.1 and 2.0, to be developed by the W3C SVG working
group. Refer to SVG 1.0 for details on
the current specification.

Feedback on these requirements documents should be sent to the email list www-svg2-comments@w3.org. This
is a public list that is archived.

2001-Jul-19

The SVG 1.0 Proposed Recommendation is published. Here is the
list of changes from the
Candidate Recommendation. As you can see, SVG is widely implemented and very stable.
The W3C is asking it's members to provide feedback within four weeks, at which time the Director will decide whether to make SVG a formal Recommendation.

Alex Fritze has made available Mozilla SVG version 0.4. This release includes a number of significant enhancements, in particular to paths, transformations and the viewport. As with previous releases, SVG can be mixed with other XML namespaces such as XHTML, XUL, XBL in the same XML file; animation via the DOM and styling via CSS is supported.

XML.com has a two-part article Creating Scalable Vector Graphics with Perl by Kip Hampton which notes: when you compare this method of scripted image creation to those provided by other
modules (that often, themselves, depend on cranky and platform-specific libraries) the true power of
combining Perl and SVG becomes obvious. A worked example of creating a pie-chart visualisation of a Web server log is also given. The article concludes: SVG is astonishingly cool. The examples above barely scratch the
surface of SVG's flexibility and communicative power.

Business 2.0 magazine has an article Graphics for Gadgets by David Orenstein which explaines the business case for vector graphics on all devices, including desktops and mobie, handheld devices .

2001-Jul-06

WebReview.com has an article Scalable Vector Graphics: The What and the How by Jason Cranford Teague which concludes As with all technologies
there will be an inevitable breaking-in period as SVG gains wider acceptance and Web
designers learn not only how to use it, but also the best ways to use it.

2001-Jul-05

A new stable version 0.6.12 of Sketch, the SVG-exporting drawing program for Linux and other 'nices, writen in Python. .

2001-Jul-04

Amaya 5.0 was released. Binaries (Solaris 8, Linux, Windows NT/2000 /95/98) and source are available. Amaya is a WYSIWYG Editor/Browser testbed from W3C. Version 5.0 allows SVG files to be referenced from the the XHTML 'img' and 'object' elements and the SVG 'image' element, as well as included inline which previous versions could already do. Another neat feature is that double-clicking on a 'use' element scrolls the structure view (if it's open) and shows the referred symbol element at the
top of the window. This version also has improved PNG image support.

2001-Jul-02

Following up on his earlier announcement, Rick Graham posted a page with scanned demos and platform specs to show what devices they have SVG running on. A variety of SVG files, which can be downloaded, are displayed on mobile devices running PalmOS (Palm IIIc, Handspring Visor Prism), Pocket PC (Compaq iPAQ H3650 and H3150), Linux (Agenda VR3), and even on the Blackberry Rim - yes, SVG on a pager!

2001-Jun-20

Rick Graham announced that The research team at BitFlashhas a version of SVG that we have created for research purposes called SdVG (Small Device Vector Graphics). The system runs on PalmOS, Blackberry Rim, and Agenda VR3 and is written in C++. A DOM is built and SMIL Animation is supported (even on the Rim!).

Note - this research work should be distinguished from the existing product, Bitflash Mobility Server which is a server side system for mobile solutions, which also uses SVG.

Michael Bierman announced that version 2.0 of the Adobe SVG implementation was available to download in a further 11 languages, making 15 languages in all.

2001-Jun-08

The French site PowerGED.compropose aux généalogistes amateurs de visualiser leurs arbres généalogiques à travers
la norme SVG et de les imprimer s'ils le souhaitent sur des banderoles
de papier grand format (allows members to visualize genealogical trees in SVG and to print them out out on large size paper).

2001-Jun-01

in-integrierte informationssysteme GmbH announced the release of Sphinx SVG 1.1, a dynamic graphical editor which exports SVG including SMIL Animation. A save- and print-disabled evaluation version is available for download. This version does allow the export of SVG so that aspect can be evaluated, but drawings cannot be saved for further editing. Details also available in German. The user interface can be installed in either English or German.

An article on XMLhack, SVG renderer for UML diagrams by Edd Dumbill, describes BOX which takes as input an XML representation of UML (XMI) and exports SVG. The code is rough, but the source is available under GPL so feel free to help improve it ;-)

Batik has exited beta - Batik SVG Toolkit 1.0 is now available. In addition to the SVG Browser, SVG Renderer, and SVG Generator that were in the beta releases, there are two format convertors (WMF to SVG and True Type Font to SVG Font). Batik now supports nearly all of static SVG, plus linking.

2001-May-09

Edd Dumbill of XML.com Reports from WWW10 - the Tenth International World Wide Web conference, held this year in Hong Kong. He reports on various parts of the W3C track including Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web and new generation XML, Thierry Michel on SMIL and Chris Lilley on SVG. The issue of legacy HTML browser vendor uptake of faster rendering, more predictable XHTML is also addressed.

Adobe announced availability of the final version 2.0 of their SVG Viewer for Netscape plugin-compatible browsers and Active-X environments on Windows32 and MacOS platforms. It is available in English and in Japanese, with other languages being rolled out later. The old version 1.0 viewer is no longer supported. There is a list of supported features.

Adobe also confirmed that this implementation will be widely distributed on CD with many Adobe products (Acrobat®, Acrobat Reader®, PhotoShop®, Illustrator®, GoLive® etc) and with Real Player®.

2001-Apr-15

Software Mechanics announced an evaluation preview of SVGmaker for W95/98/ME. This is a printer driver that exports SVG from any Windows program that can print. The demo versionsfor NT/Windows2000 and W95/98/ME remain available.

Version 0.32 of XSmiles was released. Enhancements include
SVG/XForms integration , EcmaScript mouse events in SVG viewer , SMIL switch support, and support for SVG images in SMIL presentations.

There will be a session about SVG at the 今年もやるぜ！(Mozilla dot Party in Japan 2.0). Jun Fujisawa from Canon is the organizer of the SVG session, which will be held on Sunday, 22 April 2001, 14:30 - 15:30 JST at 17th floor (West), Shibuya Mark City, Tokyo. This will include SVG demos, a discussion of the current status of the SVG in Mozilla project, and an introduction to the work of the W3C in SVG. See also the Japanese version of the Mozilla SVG page

2001-Mar-29

Square One is nearly finished beta testing their PostScript to SVG engine, used in PS2Web and PS2Vector products.

2001-Mar-24

CAD Standard Pro, a computer aided design package now has SVG export from version 3.5.1 of the product. A list of features is available. CCAD Standard Pro runs on Windows32 platforms, with a Linux version in development.

Savage Software today announced a full release of its Savage SVG Toolkit
run-time libraries. The Savage SVG Toolkit provides a packaged solution for
software publishers seeking to build SVG support into their products and is
implemented in ANSI C++. They claim to be a 100%
complete implementation of the SVG Document Object Model, as defined by
the most recent W3C Scalable Vector Graphics specification .

2001-Mar-07

Version 0.31 of XSmiles was released. This is a multi-namespace XML browser, written in java. Supported namespaces include XSL-FO, SVG, SMIL, and XForms. Thereis also XSL-T and XPath support, and DOM2 support with the EcmaScript binding.

Schemasoft has made slides (in SVG) available from a talk describing Catwalk, their SVG generator-generator - a graphical environment that allows non-programmers to automatically generate XSL-T stylesheets, which when run will produce SVG.

Programacion.net has an article Generar SVG desde XML mediante una XSLT by Joaquin Bravo which includes a worked example of generating an SVG barchart from an input XML doocument using XSL-T (in Spanish)

St. Mehlhos has made some SVG examples generated from the forthcoming version 6.1 of his 2D and 3D mathematical function plotting program, Funktion, which is expected to be available some time in February. The current version (5.4) may be downloaded, but lacks the SVG export. (German user interface).

2001-Jan-29

ITEDO software announce version 5 of IsoDraw, a technical illustration package which is especially suited to the production of parallel perspective technical illustrations. Version 5 adds SVG and WebCGM export. The are also German versions of the announcement and product details.

2001-Jan-18

Version 0.4 of Webdraw, previously known as Trajectory Pro, is available from JASC. WebDraw is a native SVG editor - SVG files may be loaded, edited in either graphical or source views, and saved. It supports the November 2 Candidate Recommendation of SVG. There is a newsgroup for discussion and feedback.

The SAVAGE SVG TOOLKIT from Savage Software will shortly be going into beta. Its a server-side implementation of the SVG DOM and provides the means to programmatically create, modify, query, validate and output SVG elements. The initial beta will be for Win32 servers, with *nixes to follow later.

2001-Jan-03

Jeroen Dekker of The Graphics Connection announced that My company (Square One) is currently working on adding SVG export to our graphics conversion suite The Graphics Connection and also said We expect to have a beta release of PS/EPS to SVG available shortly, which we will then announce to the members of this list. Square One strongly believes in the possibilities and the future of SVG, and this filter will act as a bridge to enable the mass generation of SVG content from all sorts of applications - including CAD/CAM, EDA and GIS.

Irène Vatton announced the release of Amaya 4.0 with support for editing mixed-namespace XHTML, SVG and MathML documents. Binaries are available for Windows NT/2000, Windows 9x, x86 Linux, Sparc Solaris, AIX, IRIX HP-UX and OSF-1. Source is also available.

2000-Nov-09-

Christophe VanTighem announced Celinea CR2V, a raster to vector converter which outputs SVG. Fitting is done with curves as well as lines, and there is intelligent merging of non significant regions.

Dean and Bella announced a new release of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit. The license has changed from BSD-style to Apache, and there are a bunch of bug fixes. Other features include improved support for CSS selectors, text-anchor, cursors, improved animation, and some filter suport.

Leonard Rosenthol announced:Also, next week at Seybold, Digital Applications (the folks I work for), will be announcing some new SVG tools, including an SVG->JPEG application for use server-side (Mac OS, Windows, Unix)

Using the W3C SVG Test Suite, the SVG Working Group will be evaluating existing and new SVG implementations and preparing a report on their quality and interoperability. The Candidate Recommendation phase will end when there is at least one implementation that passes each one of the Basic Effectivity tests in the test suite . The SVG Working Group then anticipates asking for the specification to move to Proposed Recommendation status.

Corel announce the final beta SVG import/export filter for Corel Draw. It generates content conforming to the March 03 spec, Stylable SVG). SVG files can now be imported as well as exported using this version of the SVG filter; there is also both internal and external Cascading Style Sheets support and improved performance.

Jackaroo, a new implementation of Stylable SVG, is announced by the Koala team. Its written in Java, and uses DOM Juan, a small-footprint DOM Level 2 implementation, to get access to the XML and CSS for rendering.

JASC announced the first prototype version of Trajectory Pro, an authoring tool for SVG that is expected to support animation and interactivity in later releases. It runs on Windows 9x/NT4/2000. The internal format of Trajectory Pro appears to be SVG, and the XML source can be viewed at any time during editing. There is a newsgroup for feedback and discussion.

Version 3.17 of ps2edit translates PostScript and PDF to, among other things, SVG. The free version outputs to a wide variety of formats, and comes with source; the shareware version adds plugins (no-source) to also export MIF, CGM, SVG, EMF and RTF. Ghostscript is required, as a PostScript interpreter. The SVG-exporting version runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000, Solaris, or Linux.

2000-Feb-20

A new raster-to-vector program, AutoTrace, exports to several formats including SVG. In addition to tracing using lines, it can also trace using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) curves. Full source is available (GPL), and it runs on a variety of 'nices (Linux, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX), Windows, and OS/2.

An SVG output filter for DrawTool, described by Toby Jaffey as "a series of toy programs (most notably a logo interpreter) which ... can now output both PostScript and SVG" is available from Project Purple. Source (GPL) available, in Perl; uses GTK.

Adobe announces the public availability of their SVG Export plug-in for Adobe Illustrator 8.01 (Mac and Win), SVG display plug-in for Netscape 4.x (Mac and Win), and SVG display ActiveX control for MS IE5 and MS Word (Win). These had been widely demonstrated to the public, but had previously required registration and signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The preview site includes examples and a detailed tutorial. Also available in Japanese.

2000-Feb-13

Scripting News reports on some experiences using the Mayura Draw for SVG export, and the Adobe SVG plug-in.

Jon Udell of BYTE Magazine discusses SVG as one way of dynamically generating a graph of constantly-updated data. Anyone care to produce an SVG alternative to the table-based, HTML graph in that article?

2000-Jan-15

Sketch, the SVG-enabled drawing program for Linux and other 'nices now has a new Web page, and is bundled with Mandrake Linux.

A new version, 0.3c of the IBM SVGViewer was released today on Alphaworks. Improvements include conformance to the 3 December SVG Working Draft; performance tuning, particularly for paths; bug fixes, and better 'symbol' and 'use' support - plus more example files.

A raster to vector converter with SVG output was released by a research group including Koichi Mori, a graduate student at University of Tsukuba, Japan. It reads 8bit-per-pixel Windows BMP files, and runs on Windows 95/98/NT. It generates not only lines, but also curves, to match the raster shapes.

A new version 0.6.3 of Sketch, the Python drawing program for Linux and other Unices which both imports and exports SVG.

1999-Nov-29

Version 0.3b of the IBM SVG Viewer is released. In addition to bug fixes, there is support for 'symbol' and 'use', gradient-filling on text, plus a progressive rendering feature

1999-Nov-29

XYZ Sistemas Industriales, S.A. announced the SVG Internet Mapper. Its an exciting application of on-the-fly generated SVG, with dynamic capabilities such as linking to additional information. (It also uses HTML, and so requires an SVG plug-in; and it uses the 'embed' tag so won't work with viewers that use the 'applet' tag.) They are asking for feedback to help improve this mapper.

SVGView 0.3a now supports the Aug 12th W3C SVG Working Draft. It provides several important enhancements, including improved network support.

1999-Oct-22

A demo of IBM AFP to SVG transcoder is available from alphaworks. Advanced Function Print (AFP) is an IBM print format, and this transcoder allows AFP documents to be viewed on the web by acting as a proxy which converts them to SVG.

Sketch, an illustration program for Unix-like systems ( Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, IRIX) by Bernhard Herzog has SVG import and export support in version 0.62. Sketch is written in Python.

1999-Sep-20

Takahashi Masahiro (高橋 雅博) released a new version of his SVG Viewer (Japanese documentation). Its 100% pure Java, uses Java 1.2, and supports both JPEG and PNG inline images (using com.sun.image.codec.jpeg of JDK 1.2 for JPEG, and JAI1.0 for PNG). Basic shapes, paths and text are implemented.

FOP, an XSL Formatting Objects to PDF converrter, now has a "tiny bit of SVG support" according to it's author, James Tauber. It generates XSL FO output, with embedded SVG, and renders this all to PDF taking advantage of the pluggable element handlers for rendering the SVG portion. See example PDF slides made from XM· source (including SVG) using XSL-T and FOP.

1999-Sep-14

A talk by Chris Lilley on SVG at XML World in Ottawa is now online. David Sims reports on this talks. Slides require a CSS 1 enabled HTML browser for decent display, and the slides are optimised for 1024x768.

The Web 3D Consortium issued a press release to announce that they have joined W3C, that X3D will be part of the next generation ISO VRML 2002 standard and that they are working on X3D interoperability with XHTML, XML, SVG, DOM and SMIL.

1999-Jul-30

The IBM SVGView SVG viewer, written in Java 2, is posted on alphaworks. It uses the IBM XML4J parser.